Travels with The Rayman

Where should I start?  At the beginning, the middle or the end?  I think the gin martini, the verre de vin blanc, and jug of verre de vin rouge is clouding my brain.  Think I’ll recite today’s travels manana (tomorrow) or in the case of francais, (demain).

Do want to capture one story.  We saw some interesting signs on the freeway.  One was “Boules de fort” which we interpreted to mean “balls of strength”.   With apologies to our francais professior, could that be right?  Then we passed an off ramp that I could have sworn said, “ twin tongues”.  Oh, my.

When we stood in a crush of people for 5 minutes without moving, we declared victory.  We had done it again.  Managing to arrive at the crush, we shared the Mont St. Michel with almost every living person in France.  Our trip to the chateau a few days earlier was child’s play.  A warm up.  This tourist site was a wonderful place to get felt by or to feel many french people!!

You know what is a hoot?  Looking at  Japanese people speaking french.  Or black people speaking french.  It blows all stereotypes out the window.  It is very mind expanding and I love it.  Living in a very white county, we are both enjoying all the diversity we are experiencing.

An aside.  The other day we were standing in line, cafeteria style, to get a bite.  A young black woman in front of us said hello in english.  Turns out she was in France on her own for a week bicycling.  She lives in Pasadena!!  Anyway, she signed on with a bicycling service that took her things to the next stopping point while she biked.  When Ray asked her why she wasn’t doing this with friends, she replied that if she waited on her friends to do something, she would never go anywhere.  Quite admirable and, dare I say, brave?!!

Anyway, back to yesterday.

Scallops for a first course, duck for the second.  This was dinner last night.  Served in a little neighborhood restaurant in La Ferte.  Yes, we did make it home.    We got up at 5:30 a.m. to drive to Mont St. Michel which is in the Baie (Bay) of Mont St. Michel which separates the Normandy region from the Brittany region.  We missed seeing this place when we went to Normandy earlier on because the innkeeper where we stayed said that he was going to give us a history of his property at 7 p.m. and dinner would follow.  Well, we ran out of time visiting Normandy beaches etc. so skipped the Mont.  But everyone that we knew told us it was a must-see so we decided we’d just do it in a day.  We got in the car about 6:15 and parked the car at the Mont about noon.  Spent two hours plus getting felt up and having a bit for lunch and headed back to La Ferte where we arrived at 8:30 p.m.  Saddle sore and aching for a drink and some food, we opted to go out to dinner a few blocks from where we are base camped!!  Great decision.

Here is a picture of a block of cheese being warmed up by the contraption that hovers above.  When it got warm, the mom peeled off pieces of warm gooey cheese to eat with the platter of food (mostly veggies) that came with it.  We’ve never seen that much cheese consumed before!!!  The family lived about 10 kilometers away and assured us in french that they don’t eat like this every day.  Our french was better than their english.  We grunted, hemmed and hawed but finally were able to communicate at least that much!!

Over dinner we agreed that trying to learn french was a huge enhancement for this trip.  Engaging with the people is the most fun.  And they are amazing.  In the countryside there aren’t many english speakers.  But they work with us mightily to figure out what on earth we are trying to say as we most assuredly butcher their language.  Another thing.  The french are exceedingly polite.  With all of France being at the Mont, we saw young families with baby carriages, people with dogs (cheins), which are accepted everywhere), people in wheelchairs…and no one raised their voices, no one got upset.  Everyone was helpful to one another.  It was amazing so much so that we took note.  It was noticeable.  Having said that, I’m sure we would have been trampled to death if someone had yelled fire.  Now the church would have survived because it is totally stone, but all the shops that line the way (cobble-stoned walkway) are filled to the brim with things to buy aunt Tillie to take home to her so she she could think, “my oh my, what on earth am I going to do with this?  They meant well.” would go up like a tinder box.

Regarding Mont St. Michel, it suffered for lack of an interior decorator.  I know, I know.  A bit snooty.  But it is true.  It was big and cold and the stained glass windows were drab.  For all the loot they’re taking in (13.50 euro each), at least they could do is upgrade those windows.  It was gothic and grey and impressive that they started the church in 966 a.d.  But still.  Apparently some order of monks from Paris just replaced an outgoing order from somewhere else.  Maybe they will make improvements.  But the reality is…they won’t because they don’t have to.  The whole of France was there anyway!!

Driving up to the structure is when it is the most impressive.  Just imagine Morro Bay rock being carved up like it?  It was absolutely stunning in it’s setting.

And here is San Ramon!!!  Looking so gay, er, happy!!  Accompanied by the author of this dreadful piece.  Actually, everyone was just filing by when we decided to snap these pictures…then all hell broke loose.  Every one started taking pictures.  It was so much fun!!

And really, we’ve probably only gained about 10 pounds.  Croissants, tarts, tartlettes, sorbets, ice cream (glace), buerre (butter) cookies, chocolat….where can a person go wrong?  We’ll go on a diet when we return…right now we’ve eating everything France throws at us (mild exaggeration!).

So, as we were double circling a roundabout because we were trying to take a short cut home and we couldn’t figure out which fork to take, we were reminded that France is a land of contrasts.  From a structure built in 966 to structures built today…this is what we saw.

A nuclear power plant.  I took so many pictures of this that I’m sure the french government now has me under surveillance.  These are located on the Loire River about 30 miles as the crow flies from where we are staying.  So, now I feel completely at home.  Notice the difference?  They aren’t hidden from view as say, Diablo.  They do not appear to be heavily guarded (I always wondered why I always passed a CHP on my way in to Avila).  Anyway, again, viva la difference.

We’ve been in France long enough now that we are just wondering…

Why haven’t we smelled skunks?

Why haven’t we seen any road kill?

The french love pigeons…they eat them, they keep them as pets, they used to use them as messengers…we, on the other hand, we don’t “take to them”.

How is it that they can drive on their auto routes at 80 mph without crashing?  and where is the highway patrol?  We’ve logged many miles and never seen one.

How did they figure out that roundabouts were a great way to keep traffic moving?  They are everywhere…small villages, big cities.  Especially in the small centuries- old villages.

When listening to the audio guides at the chateaus, they give you a big run down on all the goings on of the rich and famous.  We wonder about the average citizen during this time.  Wonder if they have a book like Howard Zinn’s – A Peoples’ History of the United States?  A book that explains what life was like for the people that built these huge batiments (buildings), the painters that painted all these rich aristocrats, the weavers that wove all the giant tapestries?

Where are the bathrooms (les toilettes) in these batiments (chateaus)?  haven’t seen a one!!  (not to be confused with the les toilettes for the tourists, complete with modern plumbing).

Why don’t they use fenetre (window) screens?   We have yet to see one anywhere.

And while architecturally beautiful and interesting, why do use the shutters?  for the ground floor, security.  But all the high rises have them too.  And they are used.   Perhaps for insulation.

hy are their streets so clean?  Their roadways?  We rarely see litter here.

It rained here today.  We walked to the poste (post office), we bought fresh fish and I managed to spit out, “vous nettoyer the poisson?” (I was trying to ask if he cleaned sardines).  He actually understood and did so.  After barbecuing them, I decided I’d rather spend my calories on something else.

We couldn’t buy gas in La Ferte.  There are two stations here both associated with supermarches (grocery stores).  French credit cards have built in “things” (a technical term) that ours don’t have.  Because petrol is so expensive, Ray drove to the next town to fill up at the rate of $80.  We’re going to take a day trip tomorrow and track how many miles/gal. we are getting.  We think it is very good.  But at $80 we didn’t want to spend our cash…we needed to charge it.

We are also planning a trip south for the first of next week for a few days.  And we planned our three days in Paris today.  So we will be prepared next time!!!

Picture above is the main street in our little town.

Mont Saint-Michel, here we come!!!

Her she is, Diana of the Hunt.  One of the many reditions.  This one resides at a chateau on the Cher river in the Loire valley.  She adorns a bedroom wall.  In another part of the chateau

fabulous copper pans hang in the cuisine (kitchen).

Then there are the cleavers.  Chenonceau is a grand chateau.  Below you can see how it stretches across the river.  Very unique and beautifully appointed.

The thing is though, everyone in France was here today.  You could hardly move inside the chateau.  That was distracting.  However, it made for good shoe watching.  I enjoyed seeing the variety of footwear.  That’s because you really had to watch where you stepped so, when moving, you were always looking down.

Ray and I decided to go dancing and an artist caught us doing the tango!!

Actually, this is a one of many pictures hung in the chateau”s gallery.  We don’t know why it was there, but it was.  Viva la difference, I guess.

And to our great surprise, Louis XIV was there!!!  The chateau had a wax museum.  Voila.  I took lots of pictures but it’s time to move on.

We drove to Amboise, a touristy town on the Loire, not far from the chateau.  Actually, Amboise has it’s own chateau.  But how many of these chateaus can you take?  So, I snapped a few pictures to capture the quaintness of the place.   One of the big draws here is chocolat!!  Many great magasins de chocolats (chocolate stores).  So we bought some.  And we followed that up with sorbet.  Ray got a banana chocolate boule (scoop) and I had a fig sorbet.  Fabulous.

Do you realize we didn’t get lost?  I didn’t fall?  More to come.

Oh, we lost yesterday.  Something about not wanting to wander too far away from le toilette.  However, it was a great day.  Did walk to the pharmacie.  After buying a few things, the nice young man who spoke anglais asked if there was anything we needed.  “Chocolat”, I replied.  Everyone in the shop laughed.  And that was a large number of people.  Because the pharmacie was about the only store open in town.  In France on Monday, everyone opens at 1400 (2 p.m.).  So, if you need anything before then, you’re in deep trouble.  There are a few exceptions:  the boulangerie, the supermarche (super market).  Even the tabac (tobacco/newstands) are closed.  Which reminds me.  Every village has several pharmacies, tabac shops, a charcuterie, boulangerie, vin (wine) shop, restaurants, real estate offices and a post office.  Larger villages have vetements (clothes store), fromage shop, patisserie, (gateaus cakes) etc.

L’exterior, le chapel, le chambre (bedroom with pink bed from the 1700’s,  l’exterior with moi and une avec mere (outside with me and Ray).

One picture I didn’t take was of a black bedroom.  Don’t think it would photograph well.  It had gold teardrops.  Black velvet tapestries etc.  Because she was mourning the death of Henry the something.  Can’t remember who she was.  But she needed happy pills!!

Picture of two streets in Amboise with part of their chateau showing.  Sidewalk cafes were buzzing.

A matter of moving backward, may I present pictures from our lost day hier (yesterday)?

This is how they package fresh fish for the trip home.  Ray barbecuing in the rain with the parapluie (umbrella).  And dessert from the boulangerie.

Opps, out of wack again.  I’m using two cameras so my timing off.  Anyway, today as we were speeding (literally, you can go about 80 MPH which is 130 kilometers) on the toll road to the chateau, there were so few cars that I slowed to almost a stand still so Ray could capture these sunflowers.  Ah, Van Gogh!!

Need to go cook dinner.  More to come.

We slept in today.  Why do I feel guilty?  Perhaps it’s because I’m not doing much today, Sunday, our day of rest.  It feels different.  You know, at home, we would having a dinner party, playing golf, dashing here and dashing there.  We would know how to get there too!!  Just for you that think we are daft…we disabled our iphones so that we wouldn’t rack up a big telephone bill and that’s the main reason we keep getting lost.  We don’t have GPS.  This seems to be a major catastrophe.

Today, I washed sheets and towels and hung them on the clothes line (everyone has a clothes line).  Our hosts have a dryer but probably only use it in winter or when it’s raining.  We see clothes on lines in many of the neighbor’s backyards.  And I think that is the charm of swapping houses.  You really get a sense of how people in the country you are visiting live their lives.  Ray ironed clothes and seemed to enjoy it because of their iron.

It is unlike any iron we have ever seen.  But is a marvelous.  It took Ray half the time to iron because that bottom that the iron sits on is caldron of boiling water.  It operates with the water under pressure.  You get instant steam and lots of it (but not too much.  Just right).  And you can put the hot iron down right on top.  Admittedly I should be listing all the fabulous places we saw today…but, hey, ironing was a new learning experience.  Ray, by the way, is pictured above relaxing on the sofa reading How to Kill Your Husband, a book he selected out of the very few choices he had.  I had no input.  I repeat.  I had no input.

Below is a picture of the downstairs hallway.  Viva la colour!!

It is Saturday in France.  And it’s the last day of July.  There is change in the air.  August is when everyone leaves wherever they are and goes to wherever they’re going.  Traffic is heavy.  The vegetable place we love is closing for the month.  And this is fairly typical.  What that means for us is unclear….we’ll hope for the best.  Knowing that this is the case, we walked to the boulangerie today.  This is the one that has been closed so we were glad to see it open.  On the way, we met a lady with a dog as big as her…a St. Bernard.  We greeted each other.  Immediately she knew we were foreigners.  Between her broken english and our fractured french we had a great conversation.  She told us her Dr. told her the dog was saving her life because she had to walk the dog religiously.  She has a sister that lives in Camarillo.  Loves all the flowers in CA.  Great conversation!!

But then I had to go and spoil it all at the boulangerie.  After getting the best bread we’ve eaten to date, I said, “ou ouvert en aout?” (where open in august?) The woman stared at me as if I was speaking martian.   Okay, I got a word or two wrong.  Ray came to my rescue and asked if they were open or closed in August.  They are OPEN!!  Made my day.  It’s the little things in France.

Just before we shopped for bread, we stopped into the visitor’s center/tourism office.  Well, the lady behind the desk couldn’t speak a word of english.  So between the two of us, we inquired about the public transportation in Orleans.  We were very unsuccessful.  However, she had nice pink cheeks and was very friendly.  The reason we wanted to know about the public transportation in Orleans is that we wanted to park outside of town and take it in to the centre ville.

Parking is tres dificile (very hard) and we wanted to avoid it.  But alas, we couldn’t break the code so we drove there to shop for some kitchen tongs, an insta-read thermometer and a shirt for Ray.  What we bought was a shirt for Ray, and ice cream cone (chocolate hazelnut for me, lemon sorbet for the skinny guy).  Oh, also a book in english.  It’s amazing but all the book stores have almost exclusively books in francais.  Imagine.  And kitchen shops are rudimentary.

Really, the only problem we had today was getting in and out of the parking garage.  I was driving and the car behind me tooted because I was stopping to get a ticket at a pedestal that didn’t offer tickets.  Then when we left, we couldn’t figure out how to pay to leave.  Suffice it to say, a man in the garage helped us and we escaped with just a, “damn it” and a “why is everything so hard” comment or two.

Made it home.  Barbecued chicken, zucchini, tossed a fruit salad and ate the other half of the bread we bought this a.m.  It is amazing bread.  No butter, no oil.  Just bread.  It’s that good!!

Really, the big disappointment of the day was not being able to reach Uncle Ralph by telephone.  His line was busy all day and all night up until 12:30 a.m. french time when I finally gave up.  It was his birthday and I was desperate to talk with him.  We figured the phone was off the hook.  But now I’m on the hook for not getting through.

I suppose you could make a case for all travel being planned.  “You pays your money and makes your choice”.  There are definite benefits to a completely paid for, all organized for you approach to travel.   They make sure you arrive when and where you are scheduled to arrive.  Most tours specialize in this.  You see more.  The guide informs you of when this church was built (there is always a church involved), when this army defeated that one, what people do for a living in this region all that…in english.  You eat on time.  You keep normal hours and there isn’t too much exercise involved other than walking.  This sounds lovely to me at this point.

Now take the other approach.  You make all the arrangements.  In our case, you study the language so that you can communicate.  Let me digress.  We studied francais for one hour a day (on average) from the beginning of December until we left in mid-July for France.  Ray did much better.  He slurs his words anyway (better to say that than, “I’m hard of hearing”) so that he could make funny nasal sounds quicker and thereby could sound frenchier!  Anyway.  That is what we did.

This all came about because we had traded our house with a nice french couple in France.  So we knew where we had to go once we arrived at Charles de Gaulle but if you’ve been following our escapades, you know that story.  Okay, so where was I?  Ah, yes, doing France on our own.  So, once we fulfilled all our previous plans of visiting Normandy, Beaune, Dijon regions…we dropped Ryan off at the TGV train (it goes 200 miles/hour) for his return trip.  Now this introduced new challenges because, as you may have observed, he was our map reader extraordinaire.  He saved us from ourselves in that we did not get lost during his tenure, generally speaking.  But now he was gone.  What could possibly go wrong?

Well, nothing at first.  We managed to navigate our way out of Dijon, the city of major street (rue) renovations.  We are sure CalTrans has moved part of their business off-shore.  And we even found the freeway/toll highway.  I was driving and Ray was co-pilot.  We needed petrol.  So we exited and bought gas.  As I was sitting there Ray approached the car, white as a sheet.  “I don’t know if I bought the right kind of gas”, he exclaimed.  Well, let me just say this.  I’m a bit old and not as limber as I think I am.  Climbing into the back seat of a tow truck is tres dificile (very difficult/hard).  And when we arrived at the garage, a VW dealership, I wanted to ask for a ladder so that I would not break something getting down.  You know, the car dealerships are much different in France.  There were three cars in the showroom with trois (3) women, one in her own special room.  To keep ourselves busy while they PUMPED the TANK empty of unleaded gasoline, we looked at the autos for sell.  No sticker’s posted on the windows.  No sales person rushing out to sell us on a car.  None of that.  One woman behind the counter was dealing with another poor chap and he didn’t speak much francais.  She had a skirt with an uneven hemline (think Tinker Bell), and stylish boots that came to above her ankles.  Her blouse was low cut and she had a 3 or 4 inch thick belt that was positioned across her hips which were a bit generous, but not bad.  Those boots did some walking.  She kept stomping out of the showroom to the garage where our car was being DRAINED.  She seemed angry.  It took her and the garage men multiple trips to change a light bulb.  She seemed unhappy.  He was unhappy.  Ray was beating up on himself for putting unleaded into a gas tank that only used diesel.  And I was laughing.  The scene was just too funny.  That i,s until the bill came.  $320.  And that didn’t count the gas we had to buy to fill up the tank, again.  Oh, and the unleaded we bought by mistake.

Now the good news.  We were smart enough to recognize the problem before we drove away and ruined the engine.

As I mentioned earlier we had to get up at 0500 (a.m.) to get Ryan to the train station (gare).  We were tired.  Ray needed something to read (presumably to get his mind off the gas adventure) so in our infinite wisdom we decided to stop in Orleans and look for a bibliotheque(bookstore) or the tourism office.  The map was hard to read with our old eyes and we ended up in the centre ville (center of town) on a plaza that cars did not occupy…except for ours.  Don’t ask me how we did it, but we did.  After escaping this unfortunate situation without killing any pedestrians of which there were beaucoup, we hightailed it out of town and made our way back to La Ferte without a book.

None of this blog entry includes pictures.  We were too traumatized.  The rest of the day was mundane.  We did laugh a lot about it though.  And we continue to do so.

Now, that would not have happened on a guided tour.  And we would have seen more.  And we would have been able to understand more explanations.  For instance, at one point, Ray turned to me and asked,  “how do I tell him how the automatic emergency break works”.   I replied, “I don’t know, Rosetta Stone never had a lesson on this situation”.   So language does offer challenges!!  And for all I know the little town we were towed to probably had some very interesting  history (Joan of Arc may have slept there).  But…we did what we did and we made our choice!!

The picture above is the TGV approaching the station in Dijon.